All night in the new country

Winner of the 2012 Sixteen Rivers Press “Poets-Under-Forty” Chapbook Prize

“Full of ghosts and lovers, roving wild dogs and disemboweled goats, Greenberg’s eerie dystopic narratives unsettle us even as they console. Quite a ride—and a remarkable collection from one of the most exciting young poets I’ve read in a while.” —Bruce Snider, author of Paradise, Indiana

“In this series of interrelated poems set in a future America, the Southwest has become a place of refugees fleeing environmental disaster and civil upheaval. All night in the new country follows a single female character who must learn a whole new way of survival. But despite the horror, these are poems that find something to love in the ravaged landscape and tell us that even in our worst moments we still seek beauty and find a reason to sing.” —Judy Jordan, author of Carolina Ghost Woods

“Some poems record our collective dreams; these collect our nightmares. Miriam Bird Greenberg’s All night in the new country documents a world where there is ‘No one / to learn your name and say it after the moon / rise,’ a world where the future is as ‘empty as a smile.’ Though there is heat in this collection, fire and friction, all the energy is directed toward basic survival. All hope is lost and even belief is corrupted. But each poem catalogs a truth both ravished and ravishing, with such stark and startling images that I could not put the pages down.” 
—Camille T. Dungy, author of Smith Blue

“All night in the new country is the thinking poet’s Walking Dead. Like The Road, only good.” —Jeff Sharlet, author of Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between

Reviews & Press

TriQuarterly: “[G]iven Greenberg’s well-attuned ear and attention to detail, the best comparison for All night in the new country might be Tarkovsky’s Stalker. (I think of Robert Bird’s analysis of the film.) The poem ‘It’s Hard to Forget’ beautifully renders the still-lifes left behind by human passing. She places raveled hemlines against ‘the abandoned kitchen’s clapboard walls / and slat-backed chairs,’ calling to mind the ways in which Tarkovsky’s camera dwells on what Greenberg calls ‘disaster’s stratum.’”

Weave: “There is a combination of beauty and terror in each poem, bearing witness to the ravages of the landscape yet clinging to the persistence of the human spirit.”

Coal Hill Review: “A catalogue of grisly images and bittersweet hope, these poems inhabit a new era that illustrates what could happen were society reclaimed by nature and ruled by caution, panic, fear, and desire...”

The Believer Readers’ Favorite Works of Poetry in 2013 listed All night in the new country as #19.

“A ‘real’ dystopic future”: An Interview from within the world of All night in the new country over at the Sycamore Review blog.